Badges of Geekness

There are certain things that gaming geeks know; like that GenCon is one of the biggest geek conventions held in the United States. True geeks know that the convention's title is short for "Geneva Convention", so titled for the fact that the first GenCon was held in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin (1968). As a miniature wargame convention, the title also paid homage to those same historical conventions of Geneva, Switzerland. I wonder how obscure this reference is to the folks who now attend GenCon, as it no longer has strong ties to its historical miniatures foundations? Sure there are still tried and true wargamers heading to GenCon, but these are only a small fraction of the attendee population. The con's primary purpose is not wargames.

And so it was that from those hex-based wargames of yore came Chainmail, the small booklet that was one of the first to outline sword-n-sorcery wargaming. Then Chainmail begot Dungeons & Dragons. And D&D begot the whole pen-n-paper rpg craze. And then all this morphed into online rpgs and tactical warfare games. Now, this is a big, bruising summary of the industry and history of GenCon, which has not been held in any town called Geneva for many, many years.

My initial point was that there are badges of geekness.

Knowing that GenCon is short for Geneva Convention is one of them.

Wisconsin, not Switzerland.

The Wegziotic Triangle

"Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of the post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small curiousity a very strange enigmatical object..." I'm blathering, of course, about the Wegziotic Triangle...

As I was pondering this year's WEGS tour, I've come to realize that we've established a triangular playing zone; from Stony Brook NY to Indianapolis IN to Greensboro NC. The center of this triangle is somewhere in the middle West Virginia*. It's my hope that many gamers start getting sucked into this zone, mysteriously disappearing off the radar of conventional game systems, only to reappear shouting "Spante!". If nothing else, the Wegshogs now know our field of battle and can start conquering the gaming world one geek at a time.

(* It's my suspician that there's some kind of eerie, glowing, multi-sided monolith here... )

Origins Aftermath...

Origins ended five days ago...
I am only just eating the peanut butter and chocolate sandwich that Sue got me for lunch last Sunday. Yes... I brought the sandwich home with me, then forgot about it in the cooler, which I just cleaned out last night. Thankfully, peanut butter doesn't go bad too quick (nor does chocolate)! These peanut butter sandwiches are one of the highlights of going to Columbus for the con; you just can't beat the Krema Nut Company for one of the best peanut butter sandwiches around! The fact that I'm finally getting around to eating the sandwich is just a taste of how nuts (pun intended) things were at the first official GameWick Games booth. It was a blast, but non-stop work. As our work is having fun, there's no downside as far as I can tell. Except exhaustion... More details to follow on the con and the games and the great folks who are calling WEGS home. I'm probably taking my posts down to once a week as there's so much other stuff to get done for the remaining summer conventions and the upcoming Pirates of Penzantium rules release. Back to my week old sandwich...

The Real Thing...

Last weekend, I was on my way back to Jersey from Virginia, and stopped by one of those slot parlours in Delaware. Slots is not my casino game of choice, though I often make machine time for video poker. Machine time, keep that in mind. Lately, the slot parlours (don't call them casinos), have been adding video table games such as blackjack, poker and let it ride. These tables have a huge upright video screen on which the simulated dealer (sim) is projected. The players sit side-by-side before the screen and have individual video monitors on the console before them to place their bets, etc. Back to the sims. The sims have the creepy ability to make eye contact with the passerbys. The damn eyes follow you! Kinda like one of those haunted house portraits... The sim dealers are buff or buxom models, sometimes clad in bathing suits (if the background is an island casino, etc). The sim video loops between them looking at the passerbys (while they wait for the players to place bets), shuffling and dealing. Kinda clever, all in all. But it's not real.

I sat down at a $2 Let It Ride table. Can't find $2 tables out in Vegas, so this seemed like a good deal. All the components you would expect were there: Bonus Bet, Three Card Bonus, etc. It was the game as it should be. But it's not real. By the third deal, I was getting bad vibes. First off, I didn't have poker chips to play with. I had no tangible sense of the game. Sure I could look at the video and see my remaining balance, but that was too much like banking. Numbers on a computer screen is Excel to me. It's work. And, what's worse, it's reality. Poker chips have some type of charge to them. The weight. The softness. It just works psychological wonders.

The other thing that was missing was the cards. In the table game, three cards are dealt face down. You pick them up and look at them. You shuffle them as you want. You use them to scratch the table to indicate a bet should be taken down. The sound of a playing card scratching the table felt, it's almost religious. With the sim, all I had was a button to take down my bet. Lastly, the comradery of your fellow players and the dealer was gone. You can't replicate that. Generally, the dealers give you some consolation if the cards are against you. They react to the odds and the gods in the game. With the sims, you get nothing. No sympathy. No humor. No consolation. Just console.

After a few more hands I had to bolt. The sim was starting to make me realize how money-guzzling stupid the game is, especially when you strip away all the physical components: cards, poker chips, banter. Losing against a computer, any game, makes a person feel dumb. Add losing money to that equation and you feel like a flippin' moron.

Sometimes it is about the game pieces...

The Green Notebook

Like four years ago, I bought a green composition notebook. Interior pages were graph paper (perfect for dungeon designing) and the inside back cover was a "Useful Information" page with conversion charts and a multiplication table (that covered up to 12 x 12 = 144). Initially, one of my design concepts for WEGS Copper Players Notebook was to have the cover/back cover look like an old-fashioned school notebook. The back cover would be complete with a multiplication table for Damage Die results, as well as other WEGS-based charts/lingo. I would still love to do this for some future release, but I think the novelty would be short-lived. Plus, when folks saw a multiplication table on the back of the book, it could lead them to think the game mechanics utilized "big math" (the DD multiplication table would need to cover at least 20x20). Only the first three pages of the Green Notebook have actually been used:

Page 1 has random notes from the movie Reservoir Dogs. When I was designing the scenario Rez Dwoirves, I watched the movie to get me inspired. Rez Dwoirves was a game that was going to be heavy on the role-play, so I needed to come up with some mechanics for that element. One concept was a mechanic for props - like guns. In the movie, guns are an extension of a characters personality. They are used to heighten their negotiation skills.

Page 2 has a random hit location chart, which is powered by 2D6. I'm hoping to get this into WEGS Kreators Notebook with a DaVinci-esque feel. I always liked the critical hit locater in Warhammer. This type of play borders on excessive detail, but its a fun add-on. It would be an in-play chart reference, and I tend to stay away from that at all cost.

Page 3 is some random starter notes for WEGS Spopera, the space opera setting. Can't wait to start coming up with lazer beam blast rules!

This notebook is kinda a file folder, too. Aside from those three pages, the notebook is jammed with loose sheets of paper. Any random thought on WEGS that hit me was scrawled on a piece of paper and put into the book. Now, I'm starting to convert all these loose notes into a working document. Just one more thing to fill in what little free time remains these days!

To The Land Of Tolkien and Gilbert and Sullivan...

A great start to 2008: GameWick has its first sale to the United Kingdom! In a matter of days, an official copy of WEGS 101 will touch base on foreign shores! This just so happens to sync up with the start of my work on the next WEGS 101 release: Pirates of Penzantium! A title inspired by the Gilbert & Sullivan comic opera... You gotta love the overseas synergy!

Quick trivia question for all twelve or fifteen of you who read this blog: Which WEGS 101 Ark Skill takes it title from a lyric in the aforementioned comic opera? There's a little prize for the first person who gets this correct (no Wegshogs allowed to answer). And, while we're on rules of this contest - only one answer per person...

Happy New Year!

I unplugged completely from GameWick the last few days of 2007. When I checked my email this morning, I had a note from a WEGS fan from the great state of Illinois:

Dear Larry,
Thanks for a great Holiday season. We have been getting the most out of WEGS101 and are anxiously awaiting the release of Copper. We had a question arise around the Molten Storm mage spell. What defines a group? We first assumed that the basic ASQR and ESQR rules applied and worked it like an area spell. However, there was a dissenting opinion that a wider area could be affected so long as the SPS+D6 limit on targets was not exceeded. I allowed this, provided that all targets were in adjacent squares. Can I get an official ruling?

Happy to say, the ruling was spot on with how I would have called it! This fan played at GenCon 2006 and had to wait a full year for WEGS 101 to be released. It's great hearing that folks are playing WEGS and having a good time!

2008...

Let the good times roll, folks!

Tribulations...

A couple days before Christmas I had scheduled a WEGS game at my local game shop. The game setting was perfect for the holidays: The Isle of Misfit Dwarfs. This game store has been selling WEGS 101 since a little before Thanksgiving, and I was showing up to restock the shelves if needed. Initially, I dropped off 10 books. They sold 5 within a week (local gaming fans), so I restocked them with another 5. Grand tally for books on their shelf was 15. It was a casual consignment agreement: they'd pay me a percent of book sales. I was giving them until the end of the year before cashing out. I really wasn't worried about it.

Imagine my surprise when I got to the store and found all the lights out and an eviction notice pasted on the door! There was a note from the owner that said something about "hard times" and re-opening soon... I could look through the window and see my little stack of books sitting in the darkness gathering dust. I told a co-worker about it and he informed me that he had just been to the store a few days prior and purchased a copy for himself. The rub is that he could've got it from me directly! I find the whole thing kinda funny.

It's shocking that a store closes during their busiest time of the year. The folks who manage the strip mall had some malicious timing on the eviction. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the store re-opens and I can get my books back (and, hopefully my consignment, too!). Time will tell.

The trials and tribulations of running your own game company...

Flashback: Yawlwyrd

For some reason, this story popped into my head last night. It was triggered by the fact I'm working on some of the game scenarios for the Cold Wars con in March. Generally, we end cons with a Sunday WEGS game of epic proportions (3+ hour session with 8+ players). We call these games Yawls, and the scenario title is some derivation of that root: The Yawlwyrd (Ubercon 2005) was the first. The Yawlamo was next, and one we've used as our staple con-closer. My new one is called Escape From Yawlcatraz (a piratey prison-break scenario). The Yawls came from the marriage of two disjointed things. The first being that it is based on the Icelandic All-thing, an enourmous meeting of chieftains, for my purpose key players. The second thing was an elevator ride I experienced at GenCon 2005, Indianapolis. In the elevator were two game geeks decked out in their fantasy armour, two non-gamer NASCAR types (father and son), and me and Sue (who showed no signs of our geekage). As soon as the two knights of the dinner table left the elevator, the two Nascar guys started cracking up to each other. They turned to us and said something like, "Can you believe those guys?!?" I said, "Yup. We're gamers. We're here for the convention, too. We just don't dress up for it." The father chuckled and replied, "Well, y'all weird!" Thus, the Yawlwyrd was born. It's a light-hearted nod to the wackiness of this hobby and the diehard commitment to have fun until the last possible moment.

2007 Con Season Ends...

Well, with MACE behind me, that's the end of the cons for this year. I hit more cons in 2007 than ever before in my short, happy life of con-hopping. Prior to WEGS, I wasn't a con-hopper. There's not too much con history in me. Started doing them in 2005, two years ago, when I hit my first Ubercon and demo-ed WEGS Copper (seems more like 10 years ago). No rest for the wicked tho', next week I have to start submitting game events for the first quarter cons of 2008...

As Harry Chapin sang it...

All my life's a circle...

Game In A Week, Part 2

Day 1 - Friday
I got the ingredients and began to ponder...

Day 2 - Saturday
I began fiddling with some concepts. Googling words. Following threads. Trying to find a theme to hold the game together.

Day 3 - Sunday
Came up with a title and concept: Big Bang Korea
Began to type up the rules, but then diverted to trying to flesh out the game system. I had some really neat game mechanics, but things began to fall apart once I began testing them. Spent most of the night working on the game system, putting the concept/story on a backburner.

Day 4 - Monday (am)
Right now, I'd consider the game 10% complete... The game continues to oscillate between being a story game and a really wacky dice game... And I'm pondering a re-haul of the whole damn thing....

WEGS At The Movies (WATM)...

The last four posts were all movie reviews - no, I haven't forsaken gaming. I've been vegging out with some horror flix the last couple of days to get me into the Halloween spirit. Watching good action/horror flicks is almost as much fun as gaming. They almost all boil down to an adventuring party with different weapons/skills who set off to face impossible odds. The first third of the movie is the character creation, the remaining two thirds is the encounter and resolution stuffing and frenzied dice rolling.

For as long as I can remember, I watch movies with WEGS in mind. I'm sure other folks do this for their own game systems, too. I'm always asking "How does WEGS handle this encounter?" I find that horror and adventure movies are easy to break down into a WEGS inning structure. Movie storylines are (mostly) chronological and the blow-by-blow action/fight scenes fall right into the game flow. I've always said to folks who don't understand this type of gaming that:

It's like playing your favorite movie, but the ending is up to the dice.

From Dusk Till Dawn...

From Dusk Till Dawn starts of as a crime thriller and switches midway to an all-out vampire horror fest. Inevitably, the movie boils down to one great good versus evil battle – more like bad versus evil given that all the “heroes” begin tainted. Clooney and Tarantino are ruthless thieves/murderers. Keitel is a man-of-god sans god. The rest of the denizens of the bar are bottom-of-the-barrel types. It’s the group’s conversion in the face of true evil that makes this a fun ride. Can’t help but to break down the characters to WEGS Arketypes:

The Sage
Harvey Keitel. The holy man, ‘nuff said. His “spell” use was the way his convictions boosted morale in the final battle. Once he found god again, the others all jumped on board. You could say that their combat stats were all raised by him (a la Blessed Warrior spell). He was also able to bless the water (spell effect that caused enchanted wounds to vamps) and keep the vamps at bay with his holy symbol (spell effect).

The Rangers
Both the kids in the film are Rangers. Juliette Lewis due to use of crossbow and guns. Ernest Liu due to use of water-pistol and holy water grenades. These two held down the ranged weapon attacks during the final battle. Due to their age, I’d even categorize them as Gnobbits (wee folk). The way that Juliette invades the same square as Clooney during the final shoot out is evidence of this…

The Warriors
Tom Savini with high Trickster marks (due to use of whip/gun and stealth combat techniques). Fred Williamson is a straight up hand-to-hand warrior with amazing Prowess stats.

The Tricksters
Clooney and Tarantino are Tricksters. Clooney’s main weapon was his Get The Point skill, which he uses beautifully throughout the movie. He gets high Warrior marks, too (due to his use of brute force/fists). His gun skill (ranged weapon) is pretty bad (couldn’t even hit the clerk in the first scene), so he must have a pretty low Ruggedness (or his dice rolls just suck!). His jackhammer weapon at the end is a wacky weapon that loans itself to equal parts Stealth and Prowess. I’d have to say that the Clooney character is a straight-up Trickster who has chosen Tough over Lucky (more Wounds than Spoints).

Tarantino is a tough one to call. He is equal parts Trickster and Ranger. He’s more of a shoot ‘em up type and gets high Ranger marks due to his gun/ballistic skills. He stinks at hand-to-hand combat and doesn’t stand a chance when the vamp jumps him. Even after Tarantino turns into a vamp, he still stinks in hand-to-hand, and is easily destroyed by the others who hold him down. He’d have Insanity marks higher than Sanity. I’d say that he’s a Lucky Trickster who uses his Spoints to counter his Insanity stat. He’d have to have a high Spoint pool as he’s the one the vamp selects to feast on first. He seems to be the Spoint prize (normally this would be the Sage, but as Keitel starts faithless, his Spoints have bottomed out).

In the end, only one Humnz Trickster and one Gnobbit Ranger survive.

That’s WEGS at the Movies, folks!

(or WATM - New tag for this blog...)

Evil Dead...

Yup - watched this one, too, this weekend. The movie wasn't as good as I remembered it. I totally forgot about the original Hills Have Eyes poster hanging in the root celler. Ha! All in all, the movie seemed goofier this time 'round. Toward the end, I got tired of the gore and fast-forwarded a bit (especially the cheezy undead melting effects).

Watching this was pre-con prep. We're running a WEGS scenario at Ubercon called From Dusk Til Dead, which is (in part) based on this movie. We're even equipping the party with a chainsword, which should be a very, very, interesting weapon. Kinda like the good, ol' vorpal blade on steroids... Powered by spoints, naturally. The weapon will be only as strong as the person wielding it - and it's not something that will last forever. That's why I like WEGS...

Noche Del Terror Ciego...

Another film review. Sorry - I'm on a movie kick lately, particularly horror, due to the season and the upcoming con. Noche... is a horror film from Spain, 1973. Called Night of the Blind Dead for the US release (they were cashing in on Night of the Living Dead craze). It was also called Revenge of Planet Ape to cash in on the Planet of the Apes craze (even though there isn't a single simian in it...). Is this movie about undead apes? Nope.

The movie opens with twelve or so Knights Templar riding into a Spanish castle. They have a virgin sacrifice with them. They perform a dark ritual with her that ends in each Knight biting her, and this imbues them, somehow, with eternal skeletal life on horseback. Ringwraiths, of sorts. The plot quickly switches to modern times (1970's). Two swinging Spanish girls (who share some dark uncomfortable college secret) have an accidental pool-side reunion (both in their bikinis). They are joined shortly by the one's boyfriend, who likes what he sees, and then invites the new girl (who he was just introduced to) to go "camping" with them. A threesome, of sorts. His girlfriend (Girl A) is none to happy about this. The next day they all get on a train to go camping (in their polyester leisurewear). On the train, there's some flirtation between the new girl (Girl B) and the boyfriend which sends Girl A steaming out of the railroad car. Girl B follows in pursuit and the two discuss the "uncomfortable situation" between them. We are treated to a flashback: the two girls in their college dorm room. Girl B makes some unwanted advances on Girl A. The flashback ends in a kiss.

Shortly, Girl A jumps off the train, leaving her boyfriend and Girl B to get on with their travels. These two see her running off into the woods and ask the conductor to stop the train. He informs them that the train can not stop at this point. It is an evil, evil area... Instead of jumping off the slow-moving train, they decide to just double-back the next day to find her. She, of course, must spend the night in the haunted castle of the Knights Templar, who arise from their crypts and slowly chase her for, what seems to be, hours. (The only thing slower in this movie is the earlier train.) The action culminates with the mounted skeletal Knights Templar chasing Girl A on horseback (she somehow gets a horse). This scene is a dead-ringer for the scene in Peter Jackson's Fellowship Of The Ring, where the wraiths chase Liv (sorry, I'm not in the mood for typing Elvish names at this point, especially when I've been reduced to calling the other characters Girl A and Girl B...).

Girl A's body is found and this kicks off a whole investigation that culminates in the boyfriend, Girl B, a Spanish smuggler and his girlfriend spending one swinging night in the castle. The dead rise and all hell breaks loose until dawn. There's a big subplot wherein Girl A reanimates as a zombie and then hunts down Girl B's office assistant in a city many miles away...

I'm not sure why any one of the twelve of you who read this blog would want to watch this. The movie is soooo bad on so many levels - but its soooo easy to enjoy. I'm sure none of the script quality was lost in translation either. See it for the pre-Jackson version of the Wraiths. I think these guys are creepier - especially the bearded one (who could have been Dr. Zaius, I suppose). See it for the creepy guy who hangs around the morgue playing with frogs. See it for the plethora of female mannequin torsos (there's a LOT of them and this film borders on strange fetish stuff throughout).

This film is weird - really weird. It's just one more reason to realize that the 70s were the last great age of entertainment when movies could be made just 'cause folks had a free weekend, a couple of cans of film, a semi-finished script and some skeleton props. And these flicks actually made it to the theatres without a single commercial product endorsement in this flick - end rant.

The best part is that this is just Part 1 of the director's quadrilogy. Yes... There's four of them! I'm tempted to see the next one - and that's more than I can say for the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise... As per the original movie poster for this film "It makes Night of the Living Dead look like a pajama party!"

Time to watch From Dusk Till Dawn...

Dog Soldiers...

Quick movie review. Dog Soldiers (2002). Saw this film last night - British werewolf flick. Basic plot: Full moon. Small troop of solidiers doing some field training in the remote mountains of Scotland encounter a pack of werewolves. The troop stumbles upon a suspicious enviromentalist chick who happens to be in their neck of the woods and who takes them to a suspiciously empty farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. With limited ammo (which does nothing to the wolf pack onslaught), the heroes basically need to make it until dawn... Depite the goofiness of the werewolves (monstrously tall and rather rigid rubber costume), the film has enough flair and quirky humour/suspense blended in to make it a fun watch. It is almost identical to the action of Night of the Living Dead (heroes inside, monsters outside, until the monsters get inside in more ways than one) - but there's a whole Agatha Christie-esque blending of the plot, characters and mystery to keep this one from sinking. Just like in The Mousetrap, the little bits of humor never kill the suspense. And there are some very funny moments - like when one of the soldiers who finds himself facing a werewolf with nothing but a stick in his hands, just throws the stick and shouts "fetch". Another soldier just decides to start boxing with a wolf when his ammo runs out. And then there's the moment when a wounded soldier with his guts torn out is fighting with a normal dog who is trying to steal off with a piece of his intestine... And the Goldilocks undercurrent is just too good not to mention. Good stuff. There's a bunch of twists/turns to the plot, almost all predictable, but its still one I can highly recommend. And it would make the perfect WEGS Horror scenario, too...

Three Innings Out...

Over the summer, at Origins specifically, we were running a Wegshog Round Robin (a session where each player has his hero character and a random group of minions to command). During these games we go head-to-head trying to prove who's the better player. The banter amongst the Wegshogs turns playfully vicious. This isn't just an in-game phenomenon, though - we're constantly berating each other every chance we get...

Now as some of you know, WEGS is played in innings, with a top and a bottom. Just like in baseball, one team goes and then the other. End of inning. As I recall this specific game, I was singlehandedly winning a two-front assault from Bob and Willy the 2. In my cocky "what did you expect, I created the game" way, I berated them prior to every roll of the dice. In an effort to make sure they realized who their daddy was I launched lengthy criticisms of why they sucked at playing the game and why I was, naturally, the better player. The crux of my argument was that:

I played the game three innings out...

At length I explained how (1) they only thought of their strategy the moment they picked up their dice on their turn, (2) that they had no concept of the word strategy, and (3) that I could actually start another game with some other players while I waited for them to finish a game I had already won last inning (which was still two innings away). It was great fun while it lasted, but needless to say, the "three innings out" line has been thrown in my face time and time again since then.

You can't win all of the games all of the time, but when the dice behave like proper steeds and allow you to command them to pull your chariot of the gods across the sky, ride it well into the night and drink heartily from the mighty cup of Hubris. Just know that the dice will abandon you as is their whim, and you will fall Icarus-esque to the feet of your friends who will then take turns plucking each and every feather out of your battered wings.

GenCon Flashbacks...

The most surreal/cool moment at GenCon happened as I was standing in the middle of the aisle looking at the copies of WEGS 101 sitting on a shelf just waiting to be sucked up by the GenCon hordes. Suddenly my wife poked me and pointed to a woman standing in the booth to the right. She noted "Doesn't that woman look like Donna?" - and it was!

Donna was a friend who we had lost touch with for easily seven years now. She was part of WEGS at its inception, when we made the jump from Warhammer to WEGS 99. We had no clue that Donna was still involved in gaming, or for that matter attending GenCon assisting a vendor!

We had just been talking about her the week before as we regaled ourselves with memories from the games of yore. The campaign Donna was a part of (as a Dwarf Warrior who was constantly sharpening her axe blade) was the greatest campaign we ever ran. It ran for at least six months straight, mostly bi-weekly, and at its apex involved 20 players in what could be considered a mid-season finale.

Actually, the really cool thing about this game was that it started as two different games that I ran simultaneously in weekly rotation with two different groups of players. Both groups however shared the same plot trajectory and ended up at the same location for one big game that we called The Night Of Chaos. In addition to these two original parties, I introduced a third party of gamers as the enemies set to destroy both parties. It was one of the best games that we ever ran and has some of the greatest post-game imagery burned into our heads. There were so many cool things about this campaign, I could rant for hours - but for those of you who are just checking out this blog, the excitement of it all would be lost. And the point of this thread wasn't about a campaign we ran over seven years ago...

The point is that there, right next to the GenCon premiere of WEGS 101, was a friend I hadn't seen in years who witnessed the first WEGS baby steps. Neither of us knew what the other was up to and, yet, we converged at the perfect moment in time. We all talked excitedly about what we had been up to. I pointed to WEGS 101 a few feet away. We joked about getting the old group back together or just getting together once we got back to NJ.

Of all the things that happened at GenCon, seeing an old friend in happy circumstances unexpectedly trumps all.

'Twas The Best Of Cons...

'Twas the worst of cons... Back from GenCon for three days now. Still bleary-eyed. Here's my top three best/worst, as I recall...

The 3 Best
The official launch of WEGS 101!
Folks showing up for games with copies of WEGS 101!
Some WEGS games were canceled due to no attendance. (Yes, this was actually a good thing. We scheduled an aggressive 18 events - we welcomed the break big time!)

The 3 Worst
A modest 7 copies of WEGS 101 were sold (no way to sugar coat that!).
The expense of it all (con fees, food, hotel, taxi, travel).
Some WEGS games were canceled due to no attendance.

Still trying to make sense of it all. From the highs to the lows, it was a non-stop endurance test, much worse than any opening week for a theatre production (aka hell week) all jammed into four days.

Would I do it again?

Heck, yeah!

More details to follow...

Summer Sucks For Blogging...

With con season, going to print with my first game and the leisurely repose of summer, my blog average has fallen... Oh, well. That's the gaming life, I suppose....